


I Sing the Body Electric

by deathwailart



Category: Original Work
Genre: Androids, F/F, Lady scientists, Meet-Cute, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-24 01:06:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6136147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I promise to remember you all," Alana says, and this close the pixels don't have their sharp edges, they blur together in Antonia's eyes, blue and white like the stars she has glimpsed only once, the way the sky used to be.</p>
<p>Ten moments where the girl and the robot fall in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Sing the Body Electric

**Two  
**  
The sky is as dark as it ever gets when she's done packing up her life. A green band like rotting meat that darkens into brown then red as it climbs higher and higher, the faded yellow of a bruise where it meets the earth. Her whole life is herself, a few weapons, one small storage locker stacked in with the caravan supplies, a backpack, and an assortment of little pouches around her hips. Her life is a partition that doesn't even reach the floor where she's granted the only window because they think that will make her stay, to see beyond the rusted corrugated wall or her flimsy curtain steadily filling with holes.   
  
She sees an end, she sees her mother when she coughed so hard her bones rattled, when her father blinked with his scarred white eyes and wept. She tries to imagine the horizon and what Alana has planted (planted, she has planted something, they don't know how it makes Antonia's heart beat faster just to taste the richness of the word) in her head.  
  
The settlement hasn't helped. They don't want her to leave, not when she's so young and healthy, her wits and eyes still sharp. She keeps the water clean, makes medicine, repairs what she can, delivers babies. But she wants more, wants better, wants someone who sighs with longing and not weariness.  
  
"We put men on the moon," an old recording warbles from a corner of the room, a post-war recording. Not that she understands why they call it a war, nobody won, nobody really fought. Dropping bombs isn't fighting. "Look at us. My son died of cholera, they sawed off my leg-"  
  
She can't stay forever.  
  
 **Five**  
  
Work is work, easier when she has actual supplies and Alana who flits around as if they've not spent months and months talking over the radio. It should be easier without the static but Alana skirts away, reminding Antonia of the lizards she would always try to catch outside one of the places she used to live.   
  
Slow and careful is meant to be the best way, to make careful tentative approaches.  
  
Alana drops a tray of beakers the first time Antonia touches her arm to suggest they actually hang out outside of this room.  
  
 **Nine**  
  
Antonia knows other things, the sort of things everyone picks up. Improvised weapons, how to start fires, how to stay low and still and quiet, how to repair clothes. Alana is tall lean lines where Antonia is short and has curves on the days when she remembers to eat, possessing a penchant for dresses that give her a figure because she likes to look human, because someone has to and when she keeps the water clean, gets the generator running or hands over a squalling baby, she should look like something.  
  
Alana watches. Alana is fascinated with this body that Antonia lets her see up close, lets Alana take her apart with her fingers until she shakes and shudders, whining all high and desperate like she only did if she was really alone. She does the same for Alana but by stroking wires, by fiddling with feedback loops until she's reduced to binary.  
  
It takes too long to get enough fabric to make a dress for Alana, and it doesn't sit quite right but Alana spins and spins and spins, her laugh warbling and bouncing off the walls of their tiny little house and it's worth each and every prick to her fingers, the way it flutters her heart.  
  
 **Eight**  
  
"I heard once that someone found an old satellite station that was still running," she whispers into Alana's neck, lips catching on the exposed wires, the taste of copper on her tongue. "That they broadcast a message: we are here, we are alive."  
  
"I promise to remember you all," Alana says, and this close the pixels don't have their sharp edges, they blur together in Antonia's eyes, blue and white like the stars she has glimpsed only once, the way the sky used to be.  
  
 **Six**  
  
The first time she actually grabs Alana's hand, she overheats. Antonia holds her until she wakes, her head cradled in her lap and mindful of the wires. She kisses the faceplate when Alana reboots.  
  
 **Four**  
  
If Antonia was a betting kind of girl, she would have put good money on her being the one to scream when the caravan drop her off and get going and she's pointed to the lab. A generous description for ramshackle metal storage containers and bits of pipe, even parts of old cars but it's bigger than anything she's ever seen and hers.  
  
Alana wasn't in the welcoming committee, and she tried not to let the disappointment show. She had been wanted, hadn't she? She had fought people and wild animals and everything between, she had learned how to strip a pistol and how not to cry when the pain caught in the back of her throat, had slept with sand in her hair with a pistol clutched tight beneath her chin.  
  
So she explores, runs her fingers over the things that are _hers_ , setting down her storage locker, her backpack, her belt of pouches.  
  
A flanging electronic shrieking sound like nothing she's heard before erupts as a tall shape steps out of the shadows, taller than any man or woman Antonia's seen and yet not, the shape of a person without definition, a faceplate or helmet instead of a head, bare wires exposed and coiling down the neck like Antonia's own curls.  
  
And she laughs, she laughs and laughs, ends up on the floor and misses the way the exclamation marks on the faceplate are replaced by a small flashing heart.  
  
 **Seven**  
  
"My function was to catalogue. I was to observe, to watch. I—I—" Antonia squeezes her hand when her voice climbs several pitches and warbles, when her faceplate shorts out. "I could not." She sounds ashamed, quiet and hollow.  
  
"You wanted to help," she suggests and Alana tilts her head to the side, weighing, considering.  
  
"I wanted to be alive with you," she clarifies, pulling Antonia closer. The faceplate is cool beneath her lips as her world flares pink and red pixelated lines, the first time in so long that red hasn't hurt to see.  
  
 **Three**  
  
On the road there are three casualties. Those are good odds for a party of ten plus Antonia, the oldest woman she has ever seen leading them, the calluses on her hands older than Antonia herself. They dig shallow graves and cover the bodies with rocks after they've taken everything they can salvage. The dead don't need much, not even markers because it'll just bring the animals, human and not, down faster.  
  
The first time she's too shocked to cry. The second she weeps noisy tears and scrubs her face. By the third the tears are silent.   
  
"Might've seen people die before," the caravan leader tells her, dragging a dirty hand through her silver hair, coarse and brittle. "But that was different. Beds. Water. Medicine. We don't get that out here. You try to make it and that's it, you know that each day might be your last."  
  
They keep moving, staking out a satellite when it lands, camping as they wait for it to cool so Antonia can pick through it with nimble fingers.  
  
She doesn't think about how the bodies were warmer when they stripped them down.  
  
 **One**  
  
There is a voice on the other end of Antonia's radio, distorted by distance, by the tinny warbling speakers, salvaged like everything else, held together with hope and prayer as much as it is by tape. The voice at the other end belongs to Alana, several weeks from the settlement Antonia has called home for the past two years.  
  
Or not home. Home was her parents, her father passing when she was fifteen, her mother when she was eighteen, the thing that had made her leave, joining up with a caravan to trek out until she stopped, tired and wanting a place to settle.  
  
Alana's voice could almost be right here with her, more real than the people she's worked alongside every day. There's a promise of more, the way Alana sighs over the radio, all soft and flanging somehow, glitches that don't sound like anything else Antonia's heard. One day the radios will stop working. One day people will have to go ranging or stay put for good, living and dying without record until someone comes to pick over their bones the way they all do now with what they have.  
  
"Come here," Alana urges, "I have a lab, a real lab, I have so many things."  
  
People want Antonia to stay but no one has ever wanted her to join them before.  
  
She can't stay forever.  
  
 **Ten**  
  
Alana is warm by her side, warmer even than the sunlight spilling in through the curtain that was once a dress, a good three inches short but she doesn't mind. She has water to clean tomorrow but for now there is Alana's hand, the humming of her CPU, the whirring of her processors.  
  
She can stay forever.

**Author's Note:**

> A rewrite of [Pretty Down to Your Servos](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2068518) now I actually know what I'm doing with it.


End file.
